Thursday, December 23, 2010

Stopped by the Logos display and got a chance to visit with Steve Runge. It's good to hear that his Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament is being well received. (The link is to the book at Amazon, but it is, of course, also available as a digital download at Logos.) I'm introducing bits of it in my intro Greek class, but I want to do more with it. I think it's helpful in making students aware of the nuances of the Greek text and why an author has chosen to express something this way instead of that.

I've been remiss about updating all that's going on with Logos lately. The updates to Logos 4 (I'm now using 4.1 SR-4 - UPDATE 12/22: They have now released 4.2) have fixed some niggling issues and have brought up full capability so that I finally am comfortable to delete my old Libronix/Logos 3 from my system. Logos 4 has turned out to be a very nice update. The speed and interface are much improved. I really like the Biblical Places tool and the quality resources associated with it. I think it's great that my Logos library is synced across the computers I use and even available via the web (and hence even at my fingertips when using my old Dell Axim x51v online). To have it available on mobile platforms is also a nice benefit. Of course, Logos is particularly happy to be shipping their Mac version.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

I had a good conversation with David Lang from Accordance at their booth here at SBL. (He's been busy working on and now happily finished with editing the Journal of Biblical Literature volumes to be accessible in Accordance.) I am still running Accordance 8 on a Windows machine using Basilisk, but the big news was the release of Accordance 9 (and now already a 9.1 release). In addition to updating the interface, the most appreciated improvement appears to be the Workspace Zones which "group, organize, and synchronize study texts and tools to maximize efficiency." Accordance has been very good at incorporating original language resources into their libraries (texts and images of codices, Samaritan Targum, DSS resources, etc.), and I am happy to see that they now have the collection of Carta publications available.

Accordance is now also at work at developing a syntactical database of the Greek NT. (Luke and John are available for now. Logos, working with OpenText.org, has already shown the benefit of this kind of database for analyzing the Greek text. Accordance appears to be using a somewhat simpler analysis [and this may well be a good thing...].)

Accordance also has announced an iPhone/iPad app which should be available soon that will allow access to all of one's modules. (Targuman has more to say about it here.)